Random Acts of Mind by Dones

Usually, we hear about how a company sucks, especially telecom companies and their spotty customer service. It’s very easy to find at least a dozen commentaries online about how Verizon Wireless sucks.

But it is rare that anyone decides to go far enough out of their way to relay a positive customer experience. This is what I’m doing, because I think Andrew at the VZW store in Olathe deserves it:

As some folks here know, my wife and I recently gave each other iPhones; mine was my birthday/anniversary present, and hers was paid for by her lucky win of an equivalently priced Garmin (we already have a cheapo GPS that works fine) at the company holiday party, which we could return for the coveted new gadget.

Well, being new customers at AT&T, and not really needing two phones (each), my wife called up Verizon Wireless’ 800 number to cancel our service. Her contract was up in October, and mine in December (I had lost my phone right after we got it, and getting a new one cheaply necessitated a contract renewal; I guess you can’t sneeze in a Verizon Wireless store without renewing your contract). So we thought, anyway: according to VZW’s records, one of our phones had been given some ‘bonus minutes’ back in September, which–you guessed it–forced a contract renewal. Cancelling would now cost us more than $150. What the heck?? If we were disputing the renewal, we had to take our gripe into the store in Olathe, where the action apparently went down…

My wife relates this to me as I’m leaving work early, sick as a dog (I’m up at 3:30 blogging in the hopes of curing my insomnia…seems to be working). It must be said here that I’ve left work sick about 4 times in my life, that I can recall, and I’m being generous with that number. I hate leaving work sick, and today was a particularly tough day for me to leave. Well, work is just seconds away from the store in question, so I suck it up for a couple more minutes in order to hopefully sort this mess out and get myself into sweatshirt and -pants, warm socks and bed as soon as humanly possible.

I go in and politely explain what was happening to Andrew, the unlucky sales clerk who had a bit of a deer-in-headlights look to him, as I would have had if a customer comes in with a dispute. Apparently, in September one of us reduced our minutes plan, but ‘as a courtesy Verizon offers a bonus minutes plan if our customers are afraid of exceeding the lower monthly limit, a service feature that requires a 2-year contract renewal.’ “‘Feature’ my foot,” I politely didn’t say, though I was thinking it. “We don’t remember signing up for that,” I explained. “We did come in in October to try out the LG Explorers, but we returned them a week later when we found they didn’t meet our needs. The salesman at the time said that we were within our cancellation window, and he would revert our contracts back to their original timelines, which means mine would have expired in December.” Andrew remained very professional, and probably responded with a practiced script from way high up in the company about ‘yada-yada, we wouldn’t have just added on this service feature, you would have had to sign for it.’

I know I didn’t sign for anything…in fact I had never set foot in that store until we went in to try out those LG smart phones. I called my wife from the store, and she said she wouldn’t have signed anything that renewed our contracts, but I still thought that she had changed our plans to a lower minute rate sometime before the whole LG thing. Seeing a possible out to this whole unhppy business, and a way to expedite my crashing at home with some comfort food and dayquil, I told Andrew that I’d quit disputing if he could produce the printout of my wife’s signature on the contract renewal. After a quick check with the manager to see how exactly to do that, he started printing out two receipts (six printed pages) from 9/19/08…which curiously had both my wife’s and my signatures.

This was very strange…once again, I had set foot in that Verizon Wireless store only two times prior to this: once to pick up my LG Voyager, and once to return it. “When did we get those LGs again?” I curiously asked Andrew. “Can you please double-check?” I had already been there at least ten minutes, which possibly kept him from at least one sale. I could tell he was sympathetic, but he felt very much in the right about the whole thing. But instead of saying anything, he calmly obeyed. It took him another minute to bring up the records and look for the transactions, then said, marvelously, “You know, after all that…”

I had my dates mixed up. I thought it was in October when we came in to try out the smartphones. Nope, I can now tell you precisely that it was September 19th. Because as my wife was signing us up for smartphones, she lowered our overall minutes plan, but had the bonus minutes feature added just in case we went over. But when we returned the smartphones, they should have rolled back the contract renewal, too. Andrew was probably as relieved as I was that we discovered this, and promptly got his manager to approve the correction. Everyone was very nice and professional, even though they had an unhappy customer who wouldn’t leave or admit he was wrong. In the end, it confirmed that if the iPhone ever comes to Verizon, or if we decide to change away from AT&T, we will definitely be returning to that store. True, they should have caught the mistake back in September, but the fact that they corrected that error so long after the fact is testament to their integrity…and the fact that I need the calendar aspect ofthe iPhone to get my dates straight.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 18th, 2009 at 3:46 am and is filed under Personal, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.